Tag Archives: Action

22 Jump Street  (2014)    66/100

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Rating :   66/100                                                                     112 Min        15

The sequel to 2012’s action comedy ’21 Jump Street’ (itself based on the late 80’s/early 90’s TV show, which helped launch the career of a certain Mr. Johnny Depp), again starring Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill and with plenty of in-jokes alluding to their increased budget this time around and the similar story – with the two cops returning undercover but graduating, figuratively, from impersonating high school students to becoming roommates in college. The returning central plot element is a new drug craze which has claimed at least one life on campus, and which of course allows the protagonists to accidentally try some for themselves.

Hill actually came up with the story, together with Michael Bacall (who has reportedly finished his script for the spin-off ‘Tropic Thunder’ film that is to centre on Tom Cruise’s scene stealing cameo character Les Grossman) and it is entertaining enough, with similar gags and action to the first one, though what it somehow manages to do quite well is play on the bromance between the leads, as one gets jealous of the other’s new college friends/social status and must deal with a resurgence of his feelings of isolation, and an ongoing lover’s quarrel ensues. Altogether, a slight improvement on its predecessor.

Edge of Tomorrow  (2014)    75/100

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Rating :   75/100                        Treasure Chest                      113 Min        12A

‘Groundhog Day’ (93) meets ‘Gears of War’ (XBox franchise) in this sci-fi action adventure starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. The film looks fantastic throughout, although it feels a little jittery in the beginning before Bill Paxton arrives to settle things, no doubt his ‘Aliens’ (86) credentials highlighting him for the role, and he makes sure to nod in James Cameron’s direction with mention of Judgement Day as we are introduced to our recognisable modern day world – except aliens called Mimics have decided to invade Europe, and with the threat barely contained there humanity plans a D-Day style invasion to be launched simultaneously on every available front, with our viewpoint being the Normandy launch from London. Cruise is a spokesperson for the military who gets himself on the wrong side of Brendan Gleeson, never wise, and finds himself very much dropped in at the deep end where he quickly gets obliterated but, mysteriously, instead of dying he finds himself back where he was twenty four hours ago …

Based on the 2004 ‘light’ novel ‘All You Need is Kill’ by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, Tom Cruise was the perfect choice for sympathetically selling a potentially difficult story to ground, and Blunt is every bit as brilliant as the successful war veteran, or the ‘Full Metal Bitch’ as the military PR dubs her (a wonderful moniker I fully intend to appropriate for personal use – you know who you are). The action is relentless, with the humans all armed with robust mechanised exosuits, real props, again much like ‘Aliens’ or ‘Avatar’ (09) but on a more manageable scale – similar to the one in ‘Elysium‘, together with elements common to computer games. Blunt, for example, often wields an enormous ‘Soul Calibur’ esque blade. Don’t expect much on the philosophy front, but this is almost seamlessly put together by director Doug Liman and despite a couple of hiccups, it’s rock solid entertainment.

An interview for breakfast telly with the two main stars …

Maleficent  (2014)    74/100

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Rating :   74/100                                                                       97 Min        PG

Disney’s latest live-action take on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale sees much more made of the villain they themselves created for their 1959 animated version, the eponymous Maleficent (the definition of whose name is the very embodiment of evil), played in a truly wonderful performance here by Angelina Jolie. It’s possible to take the various myriad renditions of the tale in all sorts of directions – I was always told the version where Prince Charming kisses the princess and nothing happens, then a few weeks later she wakes up pregnant (dragon fairy tales do not paint a favourable picture of mankind – although see the 2011 Australian ‘Sleeping Beauty’ for more on this particular theme), oddly Disney decided not to run with that one, and instead we open with a charming back story for Maleficent, the soon to be powerful fairy ruler of the enchanted moorland realm which borders the human kingdom, and the two often being at odds with one another doesn’t deter the protagonist from falling in love with a young, Scottish I might add, boy who has wandered into fairy land intent on nicking something, the little urchin – suffice to say, things do not work out as hoped.

Time passes and we are introduced to Aurora (aka, Sleeping Beauty) and what unfolds is actually quite a touching and emotive drama about love, betrayal, hatred, rage, faeries, and yes, even dragons, all the good stuff really, and bar a couple of iffy moments near the beginning it manages to be entertaining throughout. It’s directed by special effects wizard Robert Stromberg (who won the Oscar for art direction twice, for 2009’s ‘Avatar’ and 2010’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’) in his directorial debut and he has done a great job overall, with the attention and dedication given to the effects and the art, make-up, and costume departments really paying dividends – in fact it looks pretty wonderful from start to finish.

I viewed this in 2D but you can tell from the way some scenes have been layered that a lot of thought has been given to the 3D production, so it could be that this is one of those rare films that are worth actually watching in 3D. All the performances are good – Sharlto Copley plays the grown version of Maleficent’s teenage beau, sporting a pretty decent Scottish accent, Elle Fanning plays Aurora with the perfect amount of youthful zest for life, Sam Riley is a henchman, and a raven, also with a convincing accent (Irish this time), with even the leading lady’s own daughter Vivienne playing one of the very young versions of Aurora, but this is ultimately Jolie’s show, and her full commitment to the role really shines through, winningly delivering the emotional resonance needed for it to work. A pretty great film, and a perfect one for families to go and watch together.

X-Men : Days of Future Past  (2014)    77/100

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Rating :   77/100                                                                     131 Min        12A

This is perhaps not only the best of the X-Men films, but I’d definitely consider putting it into my top ten superhero films in general, a success that has to be accredited to the wonderful ensemble cast, an exciting story with a lot of soul searching for many of the characters, and the return of director Bryan Singer to the franchise, who helmed 2000’s ‘X-Men’ and ‘X2’ (03) but then dropped out to concentrate on his Superman reboot (which has since been rebooted), with Brett Ratner taking the reigns for ‘X-Men : The Last Stand’ (06).

Following the original trilogy came ‘X-Men Origins : Wolverine’ (09), ‘The Wolverine‘ (13) and ‘X-Men : First Class’ (11), and here we find a story that interweaves the threads of all the films thus far, as we see a glimpse of what the Earth looks like in 2023 with war raging between mankind and mutants, together with those who took up arms to defend them – a war that ravages the whole of humanity and yields scenes not dissimilar to James Cameron’s Judgement Day. Mechanoid hunters called sentinels, that can detect the mutant gene (a version of one of them appears in the training room in The Last Stand), have proven decisive in the conflict and the last remaining X-Men plot one final desperate attempt to avoid annihilation, by sending Wolverine back in time to 1973 to the very point of the sentinel’s deadly inception of power in an effort to change history and create a better future for all.

There are a couple of fairly unexplained and egregious continuity errors (unless we are dealing with alternative universes, which remains a possibility), most notably following on from events in The Last Stand and The Wolverine, but they can pretty much get away with it because in the former something was hinted at (not explained in that movie was the fact that the comatose patient we at one point see being cared for by Moira MacTaggert {played by Olivia Williams, and then Rose Byrne in ‘X-Men : First Class’} is in fact professor X’s twin brother who was born brain dead, prof X having no doubt devoured his mind in the womb) and, well, they’re X-Men, and in the latter what they changed was rubbish to begin with so it was a good idea to ditch it. Despite the time travelling shenanigans the story holds its own really well, with only the occasional bit of dialogue that could have done with a few tweaks, and the various character arcs at play are all pretty satisfying and should all resonate with audiences despite their variety and the extreme scenarios, as with a lot of sci-fi and fantasy it is after all the human weaknesses, problems, relationships and fragility that ultimately determines whether or not it finds a place in the viewer’s heart.

The special effects look great, as too do the real props made for the film, with the costume and makeup department really outdoing themselves. The score fits the film well, and Peter Dinklage provides just the right amount of screen presence and gravitas as the primary villain Bolivar Trask (an interesting choice of name, given it is most famously attached to Simón Bolívar who liberated much of Latin America from imperial rule – also relating to the story, in The Last Stand Bill Duke’s character is defined as Secretary Trask). Some of the enormous cast are as follows: Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Ellen Page, Halle Berry, Bingbing Fan, Shawn Ashmore, Daniel Cudmore and Booboo Stewart, with Bryan Singer making at least two cameo appearances in the background.

There’s one post credits scene right at the end, and for a bit of trivia this is reputedly the second most expensive film from 20th Century Fox after ‘Avatar’ (09) and one of the primary producers is Lauren Shuler Donner – wife of Hollywood legend Richard Donner, who of course directed the original ‘Superman’ in 78. There is an episode of Star Trek the Original Series on TV in one of the scenes, which no doubt plays on the fact the comics did on occasion interlink the worlds of Star Trek and the X-Men and interestingly a book exists, ‘Planet X’ (98), that crosses over their universe with the Next Generation’s, and when Xavier and Captain Picard meet one another they remark how much they look alike, but it was published before Patrick Stewart was signed on to play Xavier (he, of course, also played Picard in the Next Generation and its subsequent films).

Speaking of crossovers, there is now a link between the films of all three different companies making major adaptations based on Marvel characters, with this being advertised at the end of Sony’s ‘The Amazing Spiderman 2‘ (reportedly as a condition of Fox freeing up director Marc Webb to work on his second Spiderman film, but oddly Josh Helman, who plays William Striker here, also has an uncredited appearance as Striker in the movie) and here we are introduced to the character of Quicksilver, called Peter Maximoff in the film, who can also be seen in one of the post credits scenes of ‘Captain America : The Winter Soldier‘ (here he’s played by Evan Peters, but in the Winter Soldier he’s played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, ironically the two played close school pals in superhero flick ‘Kick-Ass’ 2010, whose director Matthew Vaughn helmed First Class and helped write the story for this … so many connections), although that isn’t quite the whole story with that character ….

(note the remarkable correlation between the advertising poster for the film shown above, and the national flags of Scotland and England, especially with the blue cross over Scotsman James McAvoy’s face as it is – is there a hidden referendum agenda within X-Men? If so, are we, the Scots, the mutants? I quite like that idea – possible weak but nevertheless useful powers to have: Johnny Five’s ability to read entire books in two seconds and remember everything, the ability to tell that human females are diseased by their eyes glowing red and also knowing what part of their cycle they’re on, perfect control lucid dreaming with real-time special features, being able to breath fire … )

P.S. Having watched this more than once now, I can’t be sure but I think Mystique at one point actually turns into Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Also, curiously, in ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ (98) Johnny Depp has the line “Both Kennedys murdered by mutants”, something briefly alluded to in the film …

Godzilla  (2014)    4/100

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Rating :   4/100                                                                       123 Min        12A

The picture above shows Aaron Taylor-Johnson in his central role here as Ford Brody, who must brave all to face the monstrous threat that ancient large beasties pose to the whole of mankind, although really his character, like almost all the others in the film, actually serve no real purpose and the script constantly bends itself over backwards to fit them into the plot, in this instance he looks rather like he was casually walking down the street when the director and film crew sprang upon him and shouted ‘Ok, now look over here and I want to see a look that says big dinosaur comes to life smashes everything and puts family member into mortal danger which also shows he wasn’t mental all these years and you were completely wrong about him, action!’, and alas the direction and acting do not improve on this throughout the film – asides from Bryan Cranston who, along with the effects, are the only good things about the movie (he plays the said family member in peril).

The story despite ostensibly focusing on Godzilla, actually doesn’t – we spend most of the time watching inept military personnel chasing a couple of giant bat thingys before they can mate, but their mating call attracts Godzilla who acts as a gigantic balancing force of nature and attempts to tackle them head on. Handily the bat things eat radiation and emit electro magnetic pulses, which doesn’t make any sense whatsoever but does make it more difficult for us to kill them, although a neutron bomb would surely be difficult to absorb and feed off after it’s atomised everything in the region, one would think. Or chemicals I’m sure would work, or trying to shoot them in their eyes maybe, or …. well basically they are granted carte blanche to do what they like until hero time, and the arrival of Godzilla.

It has a boredom intensity that hasn’t perhaps been seen since the last terrible American Godzilla film back in 98. This sort of tragic action film kind of had its heyday in the nineties, and thankfully studios and directors and writers learned that audiences were not into stupid contrived plots, predictable starts, middles and ends all delivered by turgid hopeless characters. It seems director Gareth Edwards is very much in love with the nineties, whose last film ‘Monsters’ (10) was much better than this but still featured nothing very interesting happening for the majority of the film. Traditionally Godzilla arrived in Japanese cinema as a cultural expression of the horror of having two atomic bombs dropped on their soil – this film seems to be saying yes but that was necessary and we, the Americans, are still the good guys. This is a horrible, horrible film and one that is extremely difficult to make it through to the end of.

Sabotage  (2014)    55/100

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Rating :   55/100                                                                     109 Min        15

The latest film from director David Ayer, who continues with similar themes from his last film ‘End of Watch‘, although he has largely ditched the hand held camera aspect this time around. We once again are put in the midst of American law enforcement, this time a squad of hard as nails DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) operatives led by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger himself, with Sam Worthington, Mireille Enos, Joe Manganiello, Terrence Howard, Josh Holloway, Max Martini, Kevin Vance and Mark Schlegel rounding out the rest of the group. Catchphrases like ‘high octane’ and ‘adrenaline fuelled action’ could probably be used to describe the action but really I think the term ‘sick’ is the most accurate descriptor for the piece. The team are caught up in a scandal when they all decide to steal some of the bad guy’s money before they burn the majority of it, but it’s not waiting at the point of egress as it should be – so where has it gone?

One by one we see the group brutally murdered, and we have to guess if it’s an internal thing, if the hits are being planned by the drug cartels, or if the rest of the department aren’t too happy about a rogue unit planning thefts of millions. The level of bloody violence has really been taken to the nth level here, which is just indulgent and silly – the same as in End of Watch when the officers uncovered all sorts of stuff when they were on the beat, things that you would normally expect to see in horror films. Olivia Williams turns up as the FBI agent assigned to investigate the assassinations and the acting is fine overall, but the plot, as well as being soaked in buckets of blood, just doesn’t add up in several places. Ayer has the skill to make an exciting action film, but he has to learn to ground it in reality, not the darkest regions of hell.

Pompeii  (2014)    31/100

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Rating :   31/100                                                                     105 Min        12A

This really couldn’t be any more derivative of ‘Gladiator’ (2000) if it tried – you can imagine the execs behind it .. ‘hmm polls show that audiences loved Gladiator, and that films with lots of explosions in them do pretty well, so what we’ll do is make another Gladiator and then half way through it we’ll blow the shit out of everything!!!’. Which is exactly what we see as Vesuvius, the volcano that buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii in 79AD, detonates like a well timed nuclear explosion for the second half of the film, showering the audience with meteors, tsunamis, earthquakes, surprisingly little lava, and dreadful escape sequences with that horrible trope of action and disaster films – characters fleeing with disaster literally just one step behind, something we have largely been mercifully spared from of late, possibly after it was taken to excess by M. Night Shyamalan with his central characters managing to outrun the wind itself in ‘The Happening’ (08).

Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who actually has done some really good films (well, one anyway – ‘Event Horizon’ in 97), but also has a series portfolio of lead weight B movies, here he’s not only copied the plot from Gladiator, but also tried to mimic the way it was directed, alas he is no Ridley Scott and it really shows. We see the warrior forced into slavery and the life of a gladiator (played in a wondrously wooden way by Kit Harrington, who seems to think he’s in a Vidal Sassoon advert for the film’s duration, see the picture above), who vows vengeance against the Roman ruler (Keifer Sutherland, attempting a posh English accent for some reason) that he will defy in the arena, cue thumbs up or down moment, but not before he’s befriended the nearest large black man to do a lot of the fighting for him (played by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who is the only one that can hold his head up high with a strong performance here) and managed to turn what was supposed to be a massacre for the slaves into their victory (battle against the Celts here replacing Carthage, although interestingly Scotland remained one of the few places the Romans failed to conquer – eventually opting to build not just one, but two walls to actually try and keep us out from the rest of their domain, ha!) and also captivating the sexual desire of the same woman that the Roman patrician also has his eye on (not the Roman’s sister on this occasion and played by Emily Browning, she is also sporting an English accent, so maybe she began as his sister and then they changed it).

The effects are fine, but it fails in pretty much every other department. We even see our leading man make a getaway from Pompeii with girl in toe on his horse’s back behind him (he can talk to animals and befriend any horse as well incidentally, which is no doubt what attracts the virginal attention of his mistress, whose previous sexual encounters will all have been on horses) and they are clean off into the night, when our hero decides he doesn’t want her to be a fugitive and he had best give himself up and say he gave her no choice. Or they could’ve kept on going and lived happily ever after. In fact they perform this same routine of complete stupidity not just once, but twice. Sigh. Despite the carnage and annihilation suffered by all around the two lovers make sure to always have enough time to fix their hair and deal with all their side plot elements, but at least Vesuvius doesn’t disappoint on the destruction scale, indeed this particular eruption is historically estimated to have emitted an amount of thermal energy many thousands of times that produced at Hiroshima and also buried several other cities in the region under ash – with tens of thousands of fatalities incurred by the roiling clouds of hot gas and rock (pyroclastic density currents) that swept the area at enormous speeds, something the film does represent, at times, really well (I don’t believe there were any meteoric asteroids though, I was there you see, chortling away to myself).

Vesuvius is currently one of sixteen volcanos being closely monitored around the world which are all volatile and present a serious threat to large populations, Naples for example is only circa 10km from Vesuvius.

Brick Mansions  (2014)    60/100

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Rating :   60/100                                                                       90 Min        15

The last film starring Paul Walker to have been completed before he sadly passed away last year features him as an undercover cop buddying up with French legend David Belle, one of the founders of parkour (which gave rise to free running), as the local resident of Brick Mansions who has fallen foul of the drug running crime lord in charge of the downtrodden area of future Detroit, and who represents a way in for the law to diffuse a stolen nuclear bomb due to go off in a matter of hours. It’s a remake of the French film ‘District 13’ (04 – also starring David Belle) which helped bring parkour to international prominence in the first place, with now perhaps the most famous instance of it on film being the first chase sequence in ‘Casino Royale’ (06).

The story isn’t too bad, and the action has been well choreographed, but it’s just too silly to be believed and it manages to be very stale from start to finish. In Casino Royale it was used to good effect, but here it mainly seems to be for show – we see Belle’s character trying to make an escape early on, and his physical feats to do it are very impressive – quickly taking him far from his would be pursuers, and yet there they are again, no matter how many floors or buildings he leaps and bounds around/over, ubiquitous bad guys are waiting to start the chase all over again, which is just a bit daft. The acting is good overall, with support from RZA, Catalina Denis and Ayisha Issa, but despite a few moments of playfulness it’s no more interesting than watching other showpieces for the physical activity.

Interestingly, the big guy that can be seen behind the two leads in the picture above is Robert Maillet, who moved from WWF wrestling as Kurrgan (taking his name from the villain, The Kurgan, in 1986’s cult classic ‘Highlander’, a name itself derived from the theorised early Indo-European people) into film and who you might recognise as having played other fairly memorable ‘heavy roles’, chief among them his first big-screen appearance as the giant immortal Persian warrior in ‘300’ (06).

Tarzan  (2013)    11/100

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Rating :   11/100                                                                       94 Min        PG

Third rate animation that can only have secured a wide release based on the fact they were adapting Edgar Rice Burrough’s most famous character for his first big-screen outing since Disney did a pretty great job back in 99. The backgrounds and some of the animated creatures in this are good – but the humans look terrible, and the story is just hopeless. Tarzan, for example, is a already a young boy of about eight or nine and able to speak fluently when his parents bite the dust in the jungle and a Great Ape adopts him, which is a fairly major departure from the novel and yet still sees Tarzan able to communicate with the animals and swing from the trees by the time he is in his late teens and he meets a ridiculously sexualised Jane, who’s constant tight fitting shorts and Barbie doll breasts seems to even attract the amorous attention of her father.

Central to the plot is the fanciful notion of a crashed meteor that, if found and harnessed, could be a source of limitless power, but this same power can prove destructive if disturbed as Tarzan’s loving parents that take him on a perilous journey into the middle of nowhere find out. This crashed meteor also looks rather like the island thingy at the end of ‘Superman Returns’ (06). There really is no skill or class whatsoever here, I wouldn’t even recommend it for the youngest and least critical of children, just rent Disney’s far superior version instead. With Kellan Lutz and Spencer Locke as principal voice leads.

Plastic  (2014)    68/100

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Rating :   68/100                                                                     102 Min        15

A fairly low key British crime thriller featuring lots of up and coming talent, and it’s actually quite good if you can stomach the preponderance of Cockney accents that verge on the hammy. A group of fledgling credit card thieves get in over their head and are forced to recruit someone working on the inside for a large card company in order to score it big and loosen the noose that’s been placed around their necks. The group, pictured above, are played by (from left to right) Sebastian De Souza, Alfie Allen, Emma Rigby, Ed Speleers and Will Poulter. Rigby shows a lot of promise but, as you can get a hint of from the picture, sadly the film plays a little too much on her womanly assets. The entourage head to Miami to bait their primary target, and so we are treated to some nice weather which makes a change for the London gangster genre, and the story holds its own for the duration of the film, as the group must contend with issues of infighting, greed and trying to keep their strongest resource in the dark as to their real motives.